Flying Staff

When I heard a few years back that the folks behind the Europa two-seat kitplane were in the process of making what amounted to a certified version, I was excited but, frankly, a bit skeptical too. The Europa, a popular kit made in the United Kingdom, is a terrific little kitplane, but I wondered if […]

__”You’ve got JeppView on an MX20 and you’re still carrying paper charts?” Jim Miller asked. “Why?” Jim Miller is executive vice president of Flight Options, the company that offers fractional shares of new and pre-owned business jets. Flight Options went “paperless” by providing the pilots of its fleet of 200 airplanes with electronic flight bags […]

At the National Business Aviation Association Convention in Orlando in September Cessna announced that it will build an all-new very light jet, the Citation Mustang, and will also develop a new Citation, the CJ3, which has a larger cabin and more powerful engines than the wildly successful CJ2. The Mustang, priced at $2.295 million, is […]

The Air Force has selected Diamond Aircraft to provide the aircraft and Embry-Riddle Aeronautical University to provide instruction for an initial training program for cadets at its Colorado Springs Academy. Under the terms of the contract, the Academy will lease a fleet of specially modified Continental-powered Diamond DA-20C1s. The fleet will start out at 14 […]

As a kid who grew up with the new math, I learned early on to look at numbers in new and different ways. So I was well prepared, it seems, to take an objective look at a different model of small aircraft ownership, fractionals. The idea behind fractional ownership is to give the airplane’s many […]

Aircraft Security & Alert Systems has introduced a new series of locks specifically designed for large-cabin business jets. The locking systems have already been designed for the Global Express, Challenger 604, Gulfstream IV, V, 200, the Falcon 900 and 2000 and the Embraer Legacy. Keys are cut vertically and horizontally, can only be duplicated by […]

When newly formed Tiger Aircraft announced a few years back that it was going to reintroduce the four-seat AG-5B Tiger, last produced back in 1993, it seemed like a natural. Unlike a number of more forgettable and more obscure airplanes that have been returned to production (sometimes successfully, more often not) since the bust of […]

It’s an old question: can fractional ownership work for small airplanes? Over the last 30 years or so, it’s been tried numerous times. Sure, the terminology has changed, from “rent-a-plane,” to “time-shares,” to today’s “fractional ownership,” but the concept has remained essentially the same. Take an airplane and split its purchase price among several owners, […]

Roy LoPresti, never at a loss for innovative designs, has joined Larry Gordon in forming the LoPresti Gordon VTOL (LoGo) company to help develop a pair of vertical takeoff and landing vehicles, the Guardian and the TurboHawk. The Guardian, an “inclined thrust angle aircraft” (ITAAC-“eye tac”), designed to require no configuration change to transition between […]

For 2003 Cirrus Design is upgrading its SR20 to an all-electric airplane. According to Alan Klapmeier, president of Cirrus, the change will eliminate the vacuum pump and put the airplane in a better position to take advantage of advanced avionics. The electrical system is a single alternator (dual alternators are optional), dual battery/dual bus fault-tolerant […]